Big Ideas in Education and Beyond

Month: March 2012

This article originally appeared in Huffington Post, Education, March 27, 2012
Today’s disruptive changes in education – from the proliferation of digital devices to the availability of open educational resources, online universities, and badge-based certification – have the field abuzz like never before. Recently I had the opportunity to give a talk at WNET’s Celebration of Teaching and Learning on creating the conditions for innovation in education.… Read the rest

This post originally appeared in The Huffington Post, September 17, 2009
In a provocative commentary published in Sunday’s Washington Post, frequent Huffington Post blogger Zephyr Teachout predicts that “a virtual revolution is brewing for colleges.” What digital technology has done to the newspaper business, it will soon do to higher education, she argues.… Read the rest

This post originally appeared in Opensource.com, January 29, 2010
I was asked to explain why the introduction of open educational resources into the education ecosystem might in fact be one of the most important things that has happened to education in the last 100 years. I guess in centuries before we might have said that it was the Socratic Method, or the advent of public schooling, or teaching to the agrarian calendar.… Read the rest

Last year, Robert Scoble came by the ISKME office to say hi and see what we were up to. As I was giving him a tour of our community garden, he looked around and said, “Great, let’s sit here and talk.” So we pulled up a couple of chairs and I began telling him about some of the work we were doing around open source education, trying to make all education content freely available with OER Commons, how I went from being an academic refuge to a social entrepreneur, and how I thought there was never a more exciting time to be working in the field of education.… Read the rest

This post originally appeared in The Huffington Post, June 16, 2009
Governor Schwarzenegger has a plan to make California the first state in the nation to provide its schools with free digital textbooks. The initiative would start this fall with online materials for high school math and science classes. The Governor explained his thinking in an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury:
[quote]California is home to software giants, bioscience research pioneers and first-class university systems known around the world.… Read the rest